COVID-19 is the pandemic that hit the world starting December 2019. Recent studies and international statistics have shown an increased prevalence, morbidity as well as mortality of this disease in male patients compared to female patients. The aim of this brief communication is to describe the pathophysiology of this sex-discrepancy, based on the infectivity mechanism of the coronavirus including the Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2), the Type II transmembrane Serine Protease (TMPRSS2), and the androgen receptor. This could help understand the susceptibility of urological patients, especially those receiving androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer, and testosterone replacement therapy.

Uroflowmetry (UF) is a common clinic-based non-invasive test to diagnose Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction (LUTD). Accurate home-based uroflowmetry methods are needed to conveniently conduct repeated uroflowmetries when patients are physiologically ready to urinate. To this end, we propose and evaluate a novel mobile sonouroflowmetry (SUF) method that estimates the urinary flow rate from a sound signal recorded using a mobile phone. By linearly mapping the total sound energy to the total voided volume, the sound energy curve is transformed to a flow rate curve allowing the estimation of the flow rate over time. An evaluation using data from 44 healthy young men showed high similarity between the UF and SUF flow rates with a mixed-effects model correlation coefficient of 0.993 and a mean root mean square error of 2.37 ml/s. Maximum flow rates were estimated with an average absolute error of 2.41 ml/s. Future work on mobile uroflowmetry can use these results as an initial benchmark for flow rate estimation accuracy.

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